The spectral gap of the 2-D stochastic Ising model with mixed boundary conditions

Abstract

We establish upper bounds for the spectral gap of the stochastic Ising model at low temperatures in an n-by-n box with boundary conditions which are not purely plus or minus; specifically, we assume the magnitude of the sum of the boundary spins over each interval of length n in the boundary is bounded by \delta n, where \delta < 1. We show that for any such boundary condition, when the temperature is sufficiently low (depending on \delta), the spectral gap decreases exponentially in n.